What kind of knitting gathering would it be if law enforcement didn't get involved?

Thanks to everyone who made it out yesterday! It was a blast.

Those of you who left a bit early missed some excitement, though. A couple of the Park's gardai came by and I was given a stern talking-to about having a public gathering without a permit! One of them kept going on about not having proper insurance and the group not being in his "book". He has a book, see, that has all the permitted activities scheduled on it, and we weren't in it! Horrors! He went on and on about it, but I think his partner was more than a little embarrassed at the whole thing. He kept looking around at this ring of women, armed with pointy sticks, all craning their necks and listening intently to his partner's silliness. Anyway, we were given half an hour to clear out. The weird thing is, a few of the Park's people had been by earlier in the afternoon, and the most they'd said was, "Are ye making me a jumper?"

Well. When they gave us the half hour, of course everyone stayed to see what would happen. Even the people who had been preparing to leave before the gardai came by stayed. They never did come back. I think they realized they had maybe gone a bit overboard about a bunch of women sitting around knitting and chatting, though. With kids running about. I mean, it was a day in the park, basically.

This is what caused the trouble:


I'd written to the Irish Times to see if they could put World Wide Knit in Public Day on their 'What's Going On?' calendar in the Saturday magazine. They did better than that- they wrote up a little blurb about it and everything. Apparently, this is public advertising and a permit was therefore needed to use the Park. I wish the gardai had come back, because I wanted to ask what if one of the Saturday city centre meetings decided to decamp to the Park on a nice day? Would we really need a permit?

I missed the blurb completely when I first looked through the magazine. I saw Aileen's profile in the 'I Made It Myself' section, so was baffled when I thought they didn't take the opportunity to tie it in to WWKIP Day. Imagine my surprise, then, when people started showing up saying they'd seen our article in the Times Magazine!

Butting heads with law enforcement aside, it was a great knitting day. I met tons of new people, drooled over great new yarns and projects, and had a grand ol' time in the sunshine, chatting up a storm.

There was- duh- lots and lots of knitting done during the day. I loved that in my pictures of the day, there was none where almost everyone wasn't actively knitting.



More knitting...



They are winding up hanks of cotton cashmere here. Cotton cashmere. In a lovely pinky-peachy-sherbet colour. I tried not to drool directly onto the yarn itself.


There was also plenty of laughing going on:

We knitters are a riot, and don't let anybody tell you any different.